Mid-Afternoon Sun on Texas Sky (16/?)
Title: Mid-Afternoon Sun on Texas Sky
Characters/Pairing: Jensen Ackles / Jared Padalecki
POV: Jensen Ackles
Author's Notes: It’s fiction. That means it’s not real, folks. Jensen and Jared are real people. So is Eric Kripke. The show “Supernatural” is a real TV show on the WB11. If anything else in this is real, I wasn’t aware of it.
This is a sequel to the previously ‘neverending story’, Early Mornings and Late Nights Under Overcast Sky. It finally ended.
Summary: Jensen and Jared go back to Texas for Christmas. Their relationship deepens and they take the next step… pr0n!
Spoilers: none to speak of
-------------------------
Chapter Sixteen: Waffles
Rating: PG-13 / R for adult content
Pairing: Jensen/Jared
Word Count: 2,776
Chapter Sixteen: Waffles
Morning breaks overcast and cold, the weather forecast calls for a chance of snow, which I find preposterous. We’re in Texas. It doesn’t snow here. There’s frost on the window though, and if I look for it, I can see my breath on the air, small puffs of white in the clear.
I run with Jared, do a set of crunches and pushups at the start, the middle and the end. I even get Jared to join me at the end. He does an extra fifteen as a “make-up”, or so he says, because he didn’t do the first two sets of twenty-five.
We drive to a local Waffle House for breakfast-it’s now ten thirty-most of the locals are already at work, so the place is pretty empty. We sit at a booth towards the back, I take the seat with the back to the wall, and I can watch people as they come in, or as they eat.
There’s a Bruce Springsteen cowboy up at the bar-little bit of a beer belly sticking over a worn leather belt and customary large belt buckle, ten-gallon hat that’s seen better days, and cowboy boots that are scuffed and worn and tell the tales of glory days better than he himself can at this point.
There’s a younger couple in a booth by the door, sipping coffee and playing footsie, talking and smiling and giggling. Young love. There’s an elderly couple, both with white curly hair and wire-rimmed glasses, forever fiddling with their respective newspapers sitting at one of the open tables. The waitress fills their coffee cups and they both smile at her, then at each other before returning their gazes to the morning paper.
Jared orders a Western Omelet with a side of grits and home fries, gets a carafe of coffee so we can both split it. I order one of their ‘double’ breakfast specials-two eggs any style (scrambled, please), two hotcakes and two sausages. It comes with toast and grits.
I offer the waitress a smile. She’s pretty, but in a homely sort of way. She’s the girl next door as opposed to the glamour princess actress hopefuls we have at the bar in Vancouver. She’s a tall girl, maybe 5’9” or higher, a little heavy around the middle, wears her mousey brown hair in a messy bun that’s held together by a pencil and a prayer. She’s got black pants that are a little too tight, a white shirt that’s a little too big, but her smile is bright and right, says good morning better than words and when she says “be right back” it reaches her eyes. She spins on a heel to get us our coffee, pauses at the bar to see if Glory Days needs anything else before retrieving a black and silver carafe and filling it with what I hope is fresh coffee.
Jared kicks me under the table.
“Dude! What was that for?” I take my eyes from the waitress and glare at Jared across the table.
“Quit checkin’ out the waitresses, Dean.”
I shake my head and glance up when the door chimes. Two men, about Jared’s age, maybe a little older, walk in. Definitely the cowboy-type, down to the spurs on the taller one’s boots and the chaps and loose-brimmed hat of the other one. They each shuck off work gloves, the one with the chaps offers a smile to the other waitress, a smaller dirty-blonde haired girl who’s pencil thin with a bad case of acne. Her name tag says her name is Tammy, and if she’s old enough to drink I’d be surprised.
His smile is gap-toothed, the others is mottled from chewing tobacco. They get coffee and breakfast sandwiches of egg and cheese on biscuits with sausages and grits. Somehow theirs comes before ours. Jared kicks me under the table again. “Jesus, Jensen. Can you make it a little less obvious?”
My full name. He’s pissed about something. “Huh?”
“My point exactly.” Jared sighs heavily. “I came here… with you… because I wanted to talk.” He fingers his silverware nervously, slides the metal of the fork between his fingers, twirls the utensil, watches as the light glints off at odd angles. His eyes flicker from the wall to his hands to the floor and back again, looking everywhere except at me.
I reach across the table to take his hand, stilling the movement of the stainless silverware, wait for him to first look at our hands, then up to my eyes. “Jared.”
He yanks his hands back as our waitress comes over, plates carefully balanced on hands and forearms. She sets down our breakfast, politely asks if we’ll be needing anything else, then leaves when I give her a smile and shake my head ‘no’.
Jared’s already shoveling food into his mouth, and I reach over again to take his hand, stopping him from eating. “Jared. Stop.”
He mumbles something that sounds like ‘what’ around a mouthful of home fries, glares at me through flashing blue-green eyes.
I kick him under the table. He swallows a thick lump, returns the kick, angrily, and takes another bite of food after yanking his hand from mine.
“Jared, what the fuck?” I ask.
“Nothing. I’m fine. Eat your breakfast.”
“You said you came here to talk…” He interrupts with a hissed, “And you’re checking out the waitresses.”, but I continue talking. “…so talk.”
He shrugs helplessly then, and it’s like all the anger just bleeds out of him, and his shoulders slump and he just looks… sad. Tired and sad and alone. “I don’t know, Jen…” He whispers, and I take it as a small victory that he uses my nickname. “I don’t know… I just… don’t know.”
“Well what did you want to talk about?”
“I don’t know.” He says, pushes potatoes around his plate, pokes at them with his fork. He swirls his spoon in the bowl of grits, trailing swirls of melting butter and thick honey through the lumpy cream-colored meal.
I breathe out through my nose heavily, careful not to sigh, and take a bite of sausage, chewing thoroughly before swallowing. “Anything about leaving for my parents’ tomorrow?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “Not really… just… I guess we’ll have separate rooms there… you haven’t told your family, have you?”
“The only member of your family who knows is your mother.” I counter quietly.
He shrugs again. “I want… I want you to be able to touch me… without me freaking out… and I want to…” He lifts one shoulder, lets it drop, glances up at me and quickly back down at his food.
“Jare…”
“I know… I know you want to be able to touch me… and I’m sorry, Jen. I’m sorry. I just… every time it feels like maybe I’m making progress… something happens and it feels like I’m right back where I started… and sometimes… it feels like everything’s just there to remind me… and to remind me that… I’m…”
“Don’t.” I interrupt sharply.
He looks at me, wide-eyed.
“I know what you’re going to say.” I glance at the waitress as she walks towards our table, and with a look in my eye tell her that we don’t need anything, and she retreats. “That you’re ugly and damaged and that you can’t be with someone… I don’t want to hear you talk like that anymore, Jared… it’s not true.”
“It…”
“It’s not.”
“I…”
“Stop saying it for me.” I whisper. “Because hearing you say those things about yourself hurts me, Jared… because when I look at you, I don’t see any of those things… and I wish you could see yourself the way I do. The way so many people do. The way our co-workers do… the way all of our… your… fans do.”
“The fans don’t know about me.” He says stiffly. “If they knew… they wouldn’t look at me the same.”
“Jared, you’re not any of those things. You’re brave and you’re strong, and you’re… beautiful, inside and out… and you had a relationship with Sandy, and like it or not, you’ve got one with me, one that I’d like to think is going pretty well...”
“I’m broken.” He whispers.
“You’re a little cracked around the edges.” I correct with a smile. “But you’re stronger than you give yourself credit for, Jare… you’re trying… and with what happened to you… that’s all anyone can ask that you do.”
“I just think that… I should be over it by now. It’s been years.” He says, and slowly starts eating his grits rather than idly swirling his spoon in them. “It’s been… a long time… and I just think that I should be… over it. Or it shouldn’t be bothering me as much as it is…”
“You spent a long time running, Jared… you blocked it out… and for a while, that was what you needed… because you weren’t ready to deal with it. Nobody blames you for that.”
“I blame myself.” He sips at his coffee, and takes another bite of the grits.
“You shouldn’t.” I work on my grits, because the sausages are cold and the bacon is cold and rubbery. “Jare… your mind protected you the best… the only… way it knew how… and at the time, that was what you needed… and now, now you can face it and deal with it…”
I top off each our mugs of coffee, add more sugar to mine and sip it slowly. Jared does the same after finishing off his grits. We sip at our coffee in silence, the conversation and our food forgotten for the time.
Jared speaks first, breaking the silence as he drains his cup and reaches for the carafe to refill it. “Thank you.” He whispers.
I’m about to ask him for what, but he continues after a minute. “…just for being here with me… it… it helps, Jen… more than you know… just to have someone who cares… to help me through this… I’d never have made it to the therapist if it weren’t for you. I feel like I owe you so much… that I’ll never be able to give you to what you’ve given to me…”
“Jare…”
He shakes his head. “No… and… when we get home… I want to tell you about the football game… and… I want you to touch me… and I’ll try not to freak out…” He’s staring down at his unfinished plate of home fries.
My eggs are as rubbery as the cold, fatty and unappetizing strips of bacon. I push the plate to the edge of the table and wave our waitress over. She gives us our check at my request, and Jared and I each pull money from our wallets to cover the small bill.
“Jared.”
“Yeah?” He asks, one long leg already half out of the booth.
“Whatever you need, man… if you freak out… that’s okay.”
“It’s really not.” He says. “It’s you… and I trust you… and I should be okay with you.” He breathes heavily.
“Jare… I don’t want you forcing yourself, because of what you think you should be okay with. If you’re not okay, you’re not okay, and I want you to tell me. I’ll understand.”
“I know you’ll understand… I just… wish you didn’t have to.” He looks so forlorn as he stands up, and I really don’t know what to say to him after that, so I let him walk away in silence, let him get a few feet ahead of me before shaking my head and starting out of the booth and out of the chain diner behind him.
Jared drives back to the ranch, stops at a local convenience store to pick up snack food and a six-pack of beer for the two-person shindig he’s apparently planning on having at home. Me, I’m thinking more along the lines of talking without alcohol, but admittedly, the alcohol makes it easier.
Neither of us speak on the way home. Jared drives with his hands at ten and two on the steering wheel, stares straight ahead with his jaw firm and mouth set in a thin line. His eyes alone move, flickering to the right or to the left depending on which rearview he uses to check traffic behind him.
I watch.
I woke alone in bed again this morning at nearly eight. Jared had already gotten up, had already showered. He was nowhere to be found, so I’d showered and dressed and went outside, thinking he’d gone running again, but saw him sitting in the open window of the barn’s hayloft. He said he’d watched dawn break over the horizon, and that was all he’d offered.
It’s not that I don’t know what waking up next to him is like that I wish for it. It’s that it’s becoming almost normal for one of us to be up before the other that makes me wish for the experience again.
Jared parks in front of the main farm/ranch house, and we hurry through cold air, jackets pulled tight around our sweaters-we have sweaters and jackets, but neither are heavy or what we’d wear in Vancouver in the winter-to the guest house.
We change into sweats and tee shirts, crank up the heat and open the curtains in the living room so we can watch and see if this chance of snow becomes a reality. Jared has a camera on the coffee table.
Before we crack open the beers or get down to … whatever it is that Jared thinks we’re going to get down to … we take care of business. Which means I pack some of my clothes into my suitcase, toss some of Jared’s into his in preparation for our departure tomorrow, and Jared takes a piss. We drive to my hometown tomorrow, where we’ll spend New Year’s, and then we fly home-home being Vancouver, and I wonder when I started calling Vancouver ‘home’-on Sunday, January 2nd.
“What time did you want to leave tomorrow?” Jared asks from the bathroom.
We’re driving almost three hundred miles tomorrow, from San Antonio to Dallas. Texas is a big state. We’d thought about just flying, taking a shuttle from San Antonio to Dallas-Fort Worth, but the only flight tomorrow was at seven in the morning, and between complications with most everyone in my family working or heading to work at the time we’d have had to have been picked up, and returning our rental here…
We arranged to be able to return the rental in Dallas, pay extra for the heavy mileage we’d put on the car. It was easiest, and even with the extra mileage fee, cheaper than flying. Not that money is really a concern to us.
In good weather with no traffic, the drive is almost four and a half hours. Assuming this cold front doesn’t let up, it’ll be at least a six hour drive. People in Texas forget how to drive when there’s even a hint of frost on the ground.
“No later than noon.” I tell him. I figure we’ll have at least two stops along the way, one for lunch or a snack, another for gas and bathroom and to change drivers-Jared’s driving the first half of the trip, and I’m driving the second half-and if we leave before noon, we should be able to get to my family’s place before seven, hopefully in time for dinner. If not, we’ll grab dinner on the way and get there in time to at least have a good night’s sleep, barring unforeseen complications like accidents or snow.
Jared shouts an ‘okay’ over the sound of the toilet flushing, and he emerges from the bathroom moments later. He looks nervous, slightly pale.
“Jare?”
“Just… nervous.” He says with a shaky smile.
“We don’t have to do this. We don’t have to do anything, Jare…” Not that I have any idea what he wants to do… start out talking or touching or do both at the same time.
“I do.” He says quietly. “For myself…”
“Jare… you don’t have to prove anything.” I follow him into the living room, sit next to him on the couch.
“Maybe not… but you should know what happened in Houston… …you… deserve to know that much… and it’ll probably be good for me to talk about it.” He breathes deeply and evenly to calm himself. “…Dr. Davidson says… it’s good to talk about it.”
“Okay.” There’s little else I can say, so I sit back against the soft cushions of the couch and listen. It’s Jared’s show.
-------------------------
Characters/Pairing: Jensen Ackles / Jared Padalecki
POV: Jensen Ackles
Author's Notes: It’s fiction. That means it’s not real, folks. Jensen and Jared are real people. So is Eric Kripke. The show “Supernatural” is a real TV show on the WB11. If anything else in this is real, I wasn’t aware of it.
This is a sequel to the previously ‘neverending story’, Early Mornings and Late Nights Under Overcast Sky. It finally ended.
Summary: Jensen and Jared go back to Texas for Christmas. Their relationship deepens and they take the next step… pr0n!
Spoilers: none to speak of
-------------------------
Chapter Sixteen: Waffles
Rating: PG-13 / R for adult content
Pairing: Jensen/Jared
Word Count: 2,776
Chapter Sixteen: Waffles
Morning breaks overcast and cold, the weather forecast calls for a chance of snow, which I find preposterous. We’re in Texas. It doesn’t snow here. There’s frost on the window though, and if I look for it, I can see my breath on the air, small puffs of white in the clear.
I run with Jared, do a set of crunches and pushups at the start, the middle and the end. I even get Jared to join me at the end. He does an extra fifteen as a “make-up”, or so he says, because he didn’t do the first two sets of twenty-five.
We drive to a local Waffle House for breakfast-it’s now ten thirty-most of the locals are already at work, so the place is pretty empty. We sit at a booth towards the back, I take the seat with the back to the wall, and I can watch people as they come in, or as they eat.
There’s a Bruce Springsteen cowboy up at the bar-little bit of a beer belly sticking over a worn leather belt and customary large belt buckle, ten-gallon hat that’s seen better days, and cowboy boots that are scuffed and worn and tell the tales of glory days better than he himself can at this point.
There’s a younger couple in a booth by the door, sipping coffee and playing footsie, talking and smiling and giggling. Young love. There’s an elderly couple, both with white curly hair and wire-rimmed glasses, forever fiddling with their respective newspapers sitting at one of the open tables. The waitress fills their coffee cups and they both smile at her, then at each other before returning their gazes to the morning paper.
Jared orders a Western Omelet with a side of grits and home fries, gets a carafe of coffee so we can both split it. I order one of their ‘double’ breakfast specials-two eggs any style (scrambled, please), two hotcakes and two sausages. It comes with toast and grits.
I offer the waitress a smile. She’s pretty, but in a homely sort of way. She’s the girl next door as opposed to the glamour princess actress hopefuls we have at the bar in Vancouver. She’s a tall girl, maybe 5’9” or higher, a little heavy around the middle, wears her mousey brown hair in a messy bun that’s held together by a pencil and a prayer. She’s got black pants that are a little too tight, a white shirt that’s a little too big, but her smile is bright and right, says good morning better than words and when she says “be right back” it reaches her eyes. She spins on a heel to get us our coffee, pauses at the bar to see if Glory Days needs anything else before retrieving a black and silver carafe and filling it with what I hope is fresh coffee.
Jared kicks me under the table.
“Dude! What was that for?” I take my eyes from the waitress and glare at Jared across the table.
“Quit checkin’ out the waitresses, Dean.”
I shake my head and glance up when the door chimes. Two men, about Jared’s age, maybe a little older, walk in. Definitely the cowboy-type, down to the spurs on the taller one’s boots and the chaps and loose-brimmed hat of the other one. They each shuck off work gloves, the one with the chaps offers a smile to the other waitress, a smaller dirty-blonde haired girl who’s pencil thin with a bad case of acne. Her name tag says her name is Tammy, and if she’s old enough to drink I’d be surprised.
His smile is gap-toothed, the others is mottled from chewing tobacco. They get coffee and breakfast sandwiches of egg and cheese on biscuits with sausages and grits. Somehow theirs comes before ours. Jared kicks me under the table again. “Jesus, Jensen. Can you make it a little less obvious?”
My full name. He’s pissed about something. “Huh?”
“My point exactly.” Jared sighs heavily. “I came here… with you… because I wanted to talk.” He fingers his silverware nervously, slides the metal of the fork between his fingers, twirls the utensil, watches as the light glints off at odd angles. His eyes flicker from the wall to his hands to the floor and back again, looking everywhere except at me.
I reach across the table to take his hand, stilling the movement of the stainless silverware, wait for him to first look at our hands, then up to my eyes. “Jared.”
He yanks his hands back as our waitress comes over, plates carefully balanced on hands and forearms. She sets down our breakfast, politely asks if we’ll be needing anything else, then leaves when I give her a smile and shake my head ‘no’.
Jared’s already shoveling food into his mouth, and I reach over again to take his hand, stopping him from eating. “Jared. Stop.”
He mumbles something that sounds like ‘what’ around a mouthful of home fries, glares at me through flashing blue-green eyes.
I kick him under the table. He swallows a thick lump, returns the kick, angrily, and takes another bite of food after yanking his hand from mine.
“Jared, what the fuck?” I ask.
“Nothing. I’m fine. Eat your breakfast.”
“You said you came here to talk…” He interrupts with a hissed, “And you’re checking out the waitresses.”, but I continue talking. “…so talk.”
He shrugs helplessly then, and it’s like all the anger just bleeds out of him, and his shoulders slump and he just looks… sad. Tired and sad and alone. “I don’t know, Jen…” He whispers, and I take it as a small victory that he uses my nickname. “I don’t know… I just… don’t know.”
“Well what did you want to talk about?”
“I don’t know.” He says, pushes potatoes around his plate, pokes at them with his fork. He swirls his spoon in the bowl of grits, trailing swirls of melting butter and thick honey through the lumpy cream-colored meal.
I breathe out through my nose heavily, careful not to sigh, and take a bite of sausage, chewing thoroughly before swallowing. “Anything about leaving for my parents’ tomorrow?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “Not really… just… I guess we’ll have separate rooms there… you haven’t told your family, have you?”
“The only member of your family who knows is your mother.” I counter quietly.
He shrugs again. “I want… I want you to be able to touch me… without me freaking out… and I want to…” He lifts one shoulder, lets it drop, glances up at me and quickly back down at his food.
“Jare…”
“I know… I know you want to be able to touch me… and I’m sorry, Jen. I’m sorry. I just… every time it feels like maybe I’m making progress… something happens and it feels like I’m right back where I started… and sometimes… it feels like everything’s just there to remind me… and to remind me that… I’m…”
“Don’t.” I interrupt sharply.
He looks at me, wide-eyed.
“I know what you’re going to say.” I glance at the waitress as she walks towards our table, and with a look in my eye tell her that we don’t need anything, and she retreats. “That you’re ugly and damaged and that you can’t be with someone… I don’t want to hear you talk like that anymore, Jared… it’s not true.”
“It…”
“It’s not.”
“I…”
“Stop saying it for me.” I whisper. “Because hearing you say those things about yourself hurts me, Jared… because when I look at you, I don’t see any of those things… and I wish you could see yourself the way I do. The way so many people do. The way our co-workers do… the way all of our… your… fans do.”
“The fans don’t know about me.” He says stiffly. “If they knew… they wouldn’t look at me the same.”
“Jared, you’re not any of those things. You’re brave and you’re strong, and you’re… beautiful, inside and out… and you had a relationship with Sandy, and like it or not, you’ve got one with me, one that I’d like to think is going pretty well...”
“I’m broken.” He whispers.
“You’re a little cracked around the edges.” I correct with a smile. “But you’re stronger than you give yourself credit for, Jare… you’re trying… and with what happened to you… that’s all anyone can ask that you do.”
“I just think that… I should be over it by now. It’s been years.” He says, and slowly starts eating his grits rather than idly swirling his spoon in them. “It’s been… a long time… and I just think that I should be… over it. Or it shouldn’t be bothering me as much as it is…”
“You spent a long time running, Jared… you blocked it out… and for a while, that was what you needed… because you weren’t ready to deal with it. Nobody blames you for that.”
“I blame myself.” He sips at his coffee, and takes another bite of the grits.
“You shouldn’t.” I work on my grits, because the sausages are cold and the bacon is cold and rubbery. “Jare… your mind protected you the best… the only… way it knew how… and at the time, that was what you needed… and now, now you can face it and deal with it…”
I top off each our mugs of coffee, add more sugar to mine and sip it slowly. Jared does the same after finishing off his grits. We sip at our coffee in silence, the conversation and our food forgotten for the time.
Jared speaks first, breaking the silence as he drains his cup and reaches for the carafe to refill it. “Thank you.” He whispers.
I’m about to ask him for what, but he continues after a minute. “…just for being here with me… it… it helps, Jen… more than you know… just to have someone who cares… to help me through this… I’d never have made it to the therapist if it weren’t for you. I feel like I owe you so much… that I’ll never be able to give you to what you’ve given to me…”
“Jare…”
He shakes his head. “No… and… when we get home… I want to tell you about the football game… and… I want you to touch me… and I’ll try not to freak out…” He’s staring down at his unfinished plate of home fries.
My eggs are as rubbery as the cold, fatty and unappetizing strips of bacon. I push the plate to the edge of the table and wave our waitress over. She gives us our check at my request, and Jared and I each pull money from our wallets to cover the small bill.
“Jared.”
“Yeah?” He asks, one long leg already half out of the booth.
“Whatever you need, man… if you freak out… that’s okay.”
“It’s really not.” He says. “It’s you… and I trust you… and I should be okay with you.” He breathes heavily.
“Jare… I don’t want you forcing yourself, because of what you think you should be okay with. If you’re not okay, you’re not okay, and I want you to tell me. I’ll understand.”
“I know you’ll understand… I just… wish you didn’t have to.” He looks so forlorn as he stands up, and I really don’t know what to say to him after that, so I let him walk away in silence, let him get a few feet ahead of me before shaking my head and starting out of the booth and out of the chain diner behind him.
Jared drives back to the ranch, stops at a local convenience store to pick up snack food and a six-pack of beer for the two-person shindig he’s apparently planning on having at home. Me, I’m thinking more along the lines of talking without alcohol, but admittedly, the alcohol makes it easier.
Neither of us speak on the way home. Jared drives with his hands at ten and two on the steering wheel, stares straight ahead with his jaw firm and mouth set in a thin line. His eyes alone move, flickering to the right or to the left depending on which rearview he uses to check traffic behind him.
I watch.
I woke alone in bed again this morning at nearly eight. Jared had already gotten up, had already showered. He was nowhere to be found, so I’d showered and dressed and went outside, thinking he’d gone running again, but saw him sitting in the open window of the barn’s hayloft. He said he’d watched dawn break over the horizon, and that was all he’d offered.
It’s not that I don’t know what waking up next to him is like that I wish for it. It’s that it’s becoming almost normal for one of us to be up before the other that makes me wish for the experience again.
Jared parks in front of the main farm/ranch house, and we hurry through cold air, jackets pulled tight around our sweaters-we have sweaters and jackets, but neither are heavy or what we’d wear in Vancouver in the winter-to the guest house.
We change into sweats and tee shirts, crank up the heat and open the curtains in the living room so we can watch and see if this chance of snow becomes a reality. Jared has a camera on the coffee table.
Before we crack open the beers or get down to … whatever it is that Jared thinks we’re going to get down to … we take care of business. Which means I pack some of my clothes into my suitcase, toss some of Jared’s into his in preparation for our departure tomorrow, and Jared takes a piss. We drive to my hometown tomorrow, where we’ll spend New Year’s, and then we fly home-home being Vancouver, and I wonder when I started calling Vancouver ‘home’-on Sunday, January 2nd.
“What time did you want to leave tomorrow?” Jared asks from the bathroom.
We’re driving almost three hundred miles tomorrow, from San Antonio to Dallas. Texas is a big state. We’d thought about just flying, taking a shuttle from San Antonio to Dallas-Fort Worth, but the only flight tomorrow was at seven in the morning, and between complications with most everyone in my family working or heading to work at the time we’d have had to have been picked up, and returning our rental here…
We arranged to be able to return the rental in Dallas, pay extra for the heavy mileage we’d put on the car. It was easiest, and even with the extra mileage fee, cheaper than flying. Not that money is really a concern to us.
In good weather with no traffic, the drive is almost four and a half hours. Assuming this cold front doesn’t let up, it’ll be at least a six hour drive. People in Texas forget how to drive when there’s even a hint of frost on the ground.
“No later than noon.” I tell him. I figure we’ll have at least two stops along the way, one for lunch or a snack, another for gas and bathroom and to change drivers-Jared’s driving the first half of the trip, and I’m driving the second half-and if we leave before noon, we should be able to get to my family’s place before seven, hopefully in time for dinner. If not, we’ll grab dinner on the way and get there in time to at least have a good night’s sleep, barring unforeseen complications like accidents or snow.
Jared shouts an ‘okay’ over the sound of the toilet flushing, and he emerges from the bathroom moments later. He looks nervous, slightly pale.
“Jare?”
“Just… nervous.” He says with a shaky smile.
“We don’t have to do this. We don’t have to do anything, Jare…” Not that I have any idea what he wants to do… start out talking or touching or do both at the same time.
“I do.” He says quietly. “For myself…”
“Jare… you don’t have to prove anything.” I follow him into the living room, sit next to him on the couch.
“Maybe not… but you should know what happened in Houston… …you… deserve to know that much… and it’ll probably be good for me to talk about it.” He breathes deeply and evenly to calm himself. “…Dr. Davidson says… it’s good to talk about it.”
“Okay.” There’s little else I can say, so I sit back against the soft cushions of the couch and listen. It’s Jared’s show.
-------------------------